OVC Adopts Best Available Free Software License

At our board meeting last week (SEP 15), the Open Voting Consortium (OVC) voted to use modified BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) for software developed by OVC.

This decision was made after much research and deliberation over the last two years. The demo (prototype) software developed by OVC used a custom modifed GPL (General Public License).

OVC board member and University of Illinois law professor Peter Maggs voted in favor of the resolution stating that he was against creating a new license. His viewpoint is consistent with input from many other sources. The resolution was introduced by David Mertz, OVC VP and Chief Technical Officer.

Specifically, "modifed BSD" is the original BSD with the "advertising clause" removed. The language can be seen on this web page. see item #4 in section 2.2.2: "All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software must display the following acknowledgement: This product includes software developed by the University of California, Berkeley and its contributors." This was dropped by UCB in 1999, and became the modifed BSD in section 2.2.1 (the language we will use).

This license means that our software will have the fewest restricitions (copyright only) and maximize compatibility with other software.

There are over 50 open source software licenses in use. The simplest ones tend to be minor variants of the modified BSD. The rest tend to have many other clauses, conditions, etc.